


With Clearer Heads

by thelittlegreennotebook



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Romantic Angst, Tumblr Prompt, With a little bit of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 15:02:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3814843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlegreennotebook/pseuds/thelittlegreennotebook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today has been one of her Bad Days. One of the really bad ones—like the ones that are locked down and secured under their own patent.</p><p>Or a reunion set in season 3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Clearer Heads

**Author's Note:**

> An Olicity reunion, prompted by Anonymous on Tumblr, that got a little long. Title credit goes to Ingrid Michaelson.

“More coffee, Ms. Smoak?”

Felicity lifts her blank stare from her tablet to look up at Jerry, half-hovering in her doorway with his red tie loose around his neck and his mousy brown hair slightly disheveled. The poor guy looks a little jittery and a little anxious, as he does when he’s not exactly sure how to help her.

As he has for the last twenty-seven days, to be exact.

“Sorry, what?” she asks him, blinking once.

He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “I was just—I saw that the coffee machine was broken, so I was going to run out and get more coffee.”

Felicity winces slightly. The coffeemaker. A victim of her tired hands and thoughtless mind when she had gone back for her second cup this morning. She’s not exactly sure what she did, but any attempts to fix it only assured its state of irreparability.

“Yeah, I—that would be great, Jerry, thanks,” she says, offering him a tight smile.

She knows he’s trying his hardest to pretend as though her hallow expressions don’t freak him out when he sends back his own too-sunny grin and lets the glass door glide back into place.

He scampers from the office like the devil is at his heels, and Felicity sighs deeply.

Today has been one of her Bad Days. One of the _really_ bad ones—like the ones that are locked down and secured under their own patent.

The ones when her scant remaining coffee flushes stale over her tongue and her sandwich sticks dry against her cheek. The ones when the creamy sunshine and bundled cotton clouds only seem to taunt the shadows that are trying to pry their way past her defenses and fill the empty spaces in her heart. The ones when she tries so hard to count the things for which she’s grateful but comes up just a little empty handed. The ones like today, when she broke the coffee machine and may have possibly forgotten to brush her teeth.

The ones, just like all the others, when Oliver’s not there.

Felicity blows out a slow, deep breath, and swivels a bit to face the window, letting the sunlight flood over her skin in an attempt to warm the perpetual chill that resonates in her bones. Her eyes slowly drift shut and she gives herself a minute—just a minute, the last of the three she allows herself each day—to wallow.

Twenty-seven days. It’s been twenty-seven days since she last saw him, since words and emotions had coalesced into a strangled goodbye and a struggling hello. Twenty-seven days—going on twenty-eight—without him. Without whatever irreplaceable _something_ she had with him—and it was, she’s come to realize over the past twenty-seven-almost-eight days, irreplaceable.

Felicity Smoak never wanted a life of mundane domesticity. Or, if she did, then any spare desire for it went flying out the window the minute she found a green package of bleeding vigilante tucked into the backseat of her car. The minute she discovered that she found out that she fit kind of perfectly in this wonky world of city-saving heroes.

She never wanted mundane domesticity, but the painful truth is that she would have settled for it—the peaceful mornings, the normal job, the quiet companionship. Maybe with another guy and in another life, it could have been nice. Maybe she had even had a chance at it, this whole other world with tight smiles and white picket fences and 2.5 children.

But the echo of the way Oliver had touched her, held her, loved her—it shattered every _what if_ she had ever dreamed of conceiving and left her drowning in reminders that being loved by someone so powerfully is inescapable. That the beat of their hearts and mere brush of their skin filled up whatever expectations she ever had for love and spilled right over the edges. She couldn’t separate herself from it any more than she could cut out her own heart.

Some days, she gets a little bitter about it, the fact that he holds every piece of her that she can possibly survive without. Just one more, and she would fall crumbling to the ground.

But it’s days like today when the bitterness deepens into agony so acute that it takes everything she has to roll out of her empty bed—the bed, she reminds herself, that can’t be missing an extra warmth it never had, no matter how sudden the chill of lonely nights seems to be.

“Okay, enough,” Felicity says aloud, screwing her eyes shut tighter and trying to banish her dark, spiraling thoughts. She takes a deep breath and tries desperately to focus on something good.

“I can do good,” she says, nodding. “There’s lots of good. There’s…there’s lunch with Thea at two at some glamorous, distracting restaurant,” she reminds herself. “That’s good. Dinner with Digg at eight with the less glamorous but equally distracting infant, also good. Ice cream waiting in the freezer and a Netflix queue to last the night. All very, very good.”

She smiles a tight smile, eyes still closed. “See? I don’t need dumb, brooding vigilantes. I don’t even want dumb, brooding vigilantes.”

She pauses at the sound of it, at the way the words feel coarse against her tongue. Her mouth twists into a doubtful grimace and she huffs with disappointment.

“Okay, dumb, brooding vigilantes are a little bit wanted. Maybe…maybe a lot wanted. Even despite the dumb broodiness.” She sighs a long-suffering sigh, throwing up the mental white flag at her own pointless mission. Days like today do not call for cheer.

“Well,” she says to herself in miserable defeat. “Jerry’s on his way with more coffee. At least there’s that.”

There’s a beat of silence before she hears a little rustle over to her left, and Felicity freezes.

“About the coffee,” comes a voice from the doorway. Her eyes fly open and fix, wide and incredulous, on the ceiling. “Rumor has it that someone broke the machine. Violently.”

She turns with measured restraint to face the entrance to her office, and there he is, like something from a dream.

Because it has to be a dream—it _has_ to be—the way Oliver is leaning up against the glass frame of her door with blue eyes twinkling, lips pulled into a smirk and two cups of coffee from the shop down the street in his hands. Like absolutely nothing has changed. Like it’s yesterday, last week, three years ago, and he is about to go blathering on about the pros and cons of syringes versus sports bottles if she doesn’t stop him and his hopeless lies.

Like he’s Oliver, her Oliver, as simply and beautifully as the sun sets and the moon rises. Like she’s waited a day instead of a lifetime.

“Oliver?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper as it coasts over her lips, the name so unused that it’s more of a useless rasp than anything else.

“Well, sure,” he says, trying to keep a straight face as he pushes off from the frame. But she can see his expression splitting at the seams with disbelief and happiness. She pulls herself up from her chair with a dumbfounded numbness and rounds her desk as he moves towards her. “Now that you see the coffee, it’s Oliver,” he continues, waving the cups around in front of him, and who is this smiling, carefree man standing in front of her? “But two seconds ago, I was just a dumb, brooding vigilante—”

“Shut up,” she says breathlessly, because it’s him, it’s really him, with his perfect, charming smile and stupid, outdated flirting and she quite literally has no control over what’s coming out of her mouth right now in this impossible moment. “I just—how are you—I just can’t believe you’re actually here and—and _coffee_ , Oliver, _really_?”

His laugh is a low rumble, throaty and deep and real, and he barely has enough time to get the coffee settled safely onto her desk before she’s crashing into him, binding her arms around his waist and burying her face in his chest.

They stand like that for a moment, solid and concrete, and she breathes an “I missed you” into the soft fabric of his Henley. He wraps his arms around her slowly, letting his hands smooth over her ribs before crossing them over the small of her back, and she feels him inhale the scent of her hair, a sentiment all on its own. His heartbeat under her cheek flutters happily and this—this is enough to banish the bad days, the darkness of their past and present and future.

She lets out a hiccupping laugh at the thought of it, of sunshine and clouds and happiness, lifting her head to press a soft kiss to his shoulder, his neck, his jaw, his cheek. She strains up onto her tip toes until their lips clash somewhere in the middle and stay there, bodies pressed together and suspended in time as the sunlight floods through the windows and warms their skin. Felicity feels it spread straight to her bones.

“It’s really you,” she says against his lips, basking in the relief of his familiar touch and curling tight fists into the back of his sweater.

He nods, his nose skimming against hers as his hands move up to glide along her neck and frame her face. “It’s really me.”

More importantly, she thinks, it’s _them_ , here and now and always. She smiles something that’s uninhibited and happy, leaning up again to press her lips to his and feeling the empty cavity of her heart being filled with all of the pieces—good and bad, his and hers, whole and broken—that finally, finally fit together.


End file.
